One day last year I went to pay for something in a shop, only to be told by a surprised assistant that I’d done it already. Realising something wasn’t right, I decided to get a taxi home but was thwarted. Normally I can remember exhaustive details of recondite subjects, or names and faces from decades previously; now I was unable to recall my own address.
I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression. My mind shutting down may have been a way of dealing with it. Colleagues had noticed oddities but been too polite to say. My work had become excruciatingly slow and was full of grammatical errors. And then began a descent into a mental state unlike anything I’d known. It wasn’t just feeling low